With the end of the year rapidly approaching, that special techie in your life deserves something awesome.

Oh, you haven’t gotten anything yet?

Look, it’s no big deal: You’ve been busy, or maybe you just forgot. But even if you only have a few hours (or minutes) to spare, a ton of readily available gifts are out there that your tech-savvy chums will adore — although some terrible choices are also lurking.

We know you don’t have much time for research, so we’ve done the hard work for you. Here are seven last-minute gift ideas that (hopefully) won’t disappoint.

Spotify Premium

Spotify: You know it, and you love it, but you probably don’t pay for it. But a premium upgrade brings a host of benefits.

Subscribers can listen to any of Spotify’s 20 million songs without suffering through ads every few minutes. Premium also enables you to download playlists to your desktop or mobile device so you can listen to them offline, making Spotify exponentially better on the subway (or anywhere else with a spotty online connection).

Spotify gift cards are at retailers like Target, Walmart, and Staples, but you can also buy Spotify e-cards online. Spotify Premium costs $10 per month.

An e-book subscription service

Now you can binge on books the same way you gorged on House of Cards.

While some folks will always prefer paper and ink, e-book services are becoming increasingly enticing now that they’re embracing Netflix-style subscription models. The two frontrunners are Oyster Books and Scribd’s e-book service.

Oyster, which has intuitive and attractive apps for iPhone and iPad, offers more than 100,000 books to subscribers. It’s signed up publishers like HarperCollins, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Workman, and Perseus. Highlights include a social media connection that shares what you’re reading with your friends (and vice versa) as well as some nifty viewing options that go beyond just text size. The service costs $10 a month.

Scribd, meanwhile, supports iOS, Android, and web browsers, making it the clear choice if your gift recipient isn’t an Apple person. At $9 a month, it’s also a bit cheaper, and it just signed a major deal with indie publisher Smashwords on Dec. 19, adding 225,000 additional tomes. Scribd now offers more than 325,000 books to subscribers, with participation from publishers like HarperCollins, Rosetta Books, Workman, and Sourcebooks. It also has social-sharing options, though its font selection, pagination, and other customization options aren’t as great as those on other services.

Ultimately, either would make a great gift, offering readers a new way to browse, discover, and consume one of the oldest forms of media.

Amazon Prime

Ideal Prime recipients don’t want some thoughtfully acquired, predetermined object; they want fast, free shipping for all the other crap they plan to purchase in 2014. A Prime subscription ($79/year) also provides access to one Kindle book per month from Amazon’s “Lending Library” as well as thousands of streaming movies and TV shows through Prime Instant Video. (You know you want to rewatch Galaxy Quest.)

Amazon has signed a licensing agreement with A&E Networks that will make TV shows from A&E, Bio, History, and Lifetime channels available to watch on Prime Instant Video, the company announced today.

Amazon claims the Prime Instant Video service now has more than 33,000 movies and TV episodes that you can stream instantly on a variety of devices. That’s a far cry from the amount of content provided by its biggest competitor, Netflix, but at least it’s getting better.

“In a year we have more than doubled the Prime Instant Video selection for our Prime members,” said Brad Beale, the director of digital video content acquisition for Amazon, in a statement. “We remain focused on adding TV episodes and movies to Prime Instant Video that we think our customers will enjoy. A&E Networks has some of the most popular shows on television, and we know our customers will love streaming the A+E content with Prime Instant Video.”

Today’s deal will bring some of the highest rated television shows from A&E’s networks to Prime, including hits like Pawn Stars, Storage Wars, and Dance Moms.

Last year, Amazon signed quite a few deals to make Prime’s library of movies and TV shows larger. These include a deal with Epix to get The Hunger Games and The Avengers and a deal with NBC to have shows such as Parks and Recreation, Friday Night Lights, and Battlestar Galactica.

]]>http://venturebeat.com/2013/01/04/amazon-a-e-instant-video-deal/feed/0598928Amazon signs deal to bring A&E, Bio, History, and Lifetime TV shows to Prime Instant VideoAmazon Prime Instant Video app finally arrives on the iPhone — but without Airplayhttp://venturebeat.com/2012/12/13/amazon-prime-instant-video-iphone/
http://venturebeat.com/2012/12/13/amazon-prime-instant-video-iphone/#respondThu, 13 Dec 2012 16:09:56 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=589546Months after the debut of its iPad app, Amazon has now released a new version of its Prime Instant Video iOS app that's been optimized to play on the iPhone.
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The app itself serves up hundreds of videos available within Amazon Prime’s streaming video library as well as any rented or purchased videos from Amazon. You can also download those movies or TV shows to watch when you don’t have an Internet connection. It also has plenty of options to manage your personal video watchlist.

What you can’t do with the app is purchase or rent non-Prime videos. To do that you’ll need to visit Amazon’s website, make the purchase, and then head back into the app. Part of this is probably due to Apple’s 30 percent commission fee on all purchases made through an iOS app. Amazon understandably doesn’t want to give Apple a cut of its digital video sales.

The other thing you can’t do with the Amazon Prime Instant Video app is enable the Airplay feature on Apple TV. Basically, that means you cannot watch Amazon Prime videos on your television when playing them from your iPhone. That’s a huge letdown, because it really demonstrates how closed Apple really is when it comes to direct competitors — especially since Apple doesn’t have its own unlimited streaming video subscription service.

The app is available today for free in the App Store, but to access the Prime Instant Video library, you’ll need to have an Amazon Prime membership.